In La Vie en Bleu: France and the French since 1900, published in 2005, Rod Kedward presented a clear, generous and well-documented survey of life in 20th-century France. But he also made a striking argument: that a history of modern France must also be a history of the stories French people tell about their past. The same could perhaps be said of any community that lays claim to national status, but in France the stories are peculiarly clear-cut and they command extraordinarily wide support. Commemorations of the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 have enabled the French nation to keep reinventing itself as a champion of liberty, equality and fraternity, with conservatives joining leftists in singing the Marseillaise, waving the tricolore and promising to meet any affront to national pride with fierce resistance. 

The phrase résistance française goes back to the 1890s, when it was adopted by anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. It was revived during the First World War, when the statesman Alexandre Millerand used it in a lecture on what he called la guerre libératrice. But it did not go mainstream until the German invasion in 1940 and the subsequent division of France into a northern zone, run by German occupiers, and a southern zone under the control, nominally at least, of compliant French politicians. France was no longer at war with Germany, and while most of the population acquiesced in the new arrangement, a significant minority did not, and formed what came to be known  as the ‘French Resistance’. 

In his new book, Kedward reflects on how tales of the Resistance have changed over time. The French Resistance and Its Legacy is a fascinating exercise in second-order history, but it is also laced with personal reminiscences. Between 1968 and 1975, Kedward conducted dozens of interviews with former résistants in